John Dickson Carr, The
Crooked Hinge
Copyright © 1938 Estate of Clarice M. Carr
Reprinted by The Mysterious Press, 2019
ISBN 978-1-16316-130-2
As I began reading The
Crooked Hinge, I had conflicting impressions—first, that I was reading it
for the first time, and, second, that I had read it and knew how it turned
out. Those impressions persisted
throughout my reading, until the very end.
Partly because the book’s title rang no bells for me at all. (I checked on the “Stop, You’re Killing Me
website, to see whether the book had been published at some time under another
title—but it had not.
Let me begin here by saying that The Crooked Hinge is not
exactly a locked-room mystery; it is an “impossible crime mystery. The murder is witnessed by several of the
others involved. But no one actually
sees how the murder was committed. This
is one of the reasons I thought I had already read it—I knew both how and who immediately.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The story is set in the late 1930s, and involves as
principals, two men who, as young boys, had been sent to America. In 1914.
On the Titanic. One was John Fairleigh, the younger son of
Sir Dudley Fairleigh; he was sent to (they hoped) reform his ways. The other was a boy of about the same age,
Patrick Gore, the child of a poor family.
The ship, of course, sank, the boys survived. And, years later, after his older brother
died, John Farleigh returned to England, inherited the property, and set about
being the typical country squire—including marrying the young woman whom he had
known. Then, a man who had grown up
under the name Patrick Gore arrives, claiming to be the true John Farleigh, and
seeks to take possession of the estate.
(To keep things from becoming too tangled, I will refer to the man who
did inherit Farleigh and the interloper Gore.)
Both men have engaged solicitors. And they are to meet to discuss the situation. And, as it turns out, for one to be identified
as the real John Fairleigh. The
identification is to be provided by Kennett Murray, Fairleigh’s tutor as a
young boy, who has, in addition to that knowledge, a set of fingerprints, taken
of young Fairleigh 20+ years before.
Death intervenes. As
I was (re?)reading, I expected the victim to me Murray (of course). But it was Fairleigh, who was in the middle
of a sort of maze (the shrubbery being about waist high) who dies, with no one
within sight, by (apparently) slashing his throat with an old knife. I appears, of course, to be suicide (which
would clear up the identity issue). But
not everyone is convinced, including a police inspector (from London, who’s
there because of another death, clearly a murder) and Dr. Gideon Fell. (I want to pause, and give thanks to the
designer of the cover of this edition of the book; I now know what Dr. Fell’s “shovel
hat” looks like.)
We get that far quite quickly. The problem is that, as more information
becomes available, the case for suicide becomes weaker and the case for murder
becomes stronger. And the issue of which
of the men was actually Sir John Fairleigh now takes on a somewhat different
role.
But Dr. Fell does unravel the mystery. And it was, in fact, the solution that I “remembered”
from my unclear memory of having once, long ago, read the book. Carr was a master of creating situation that
make it seem impossible for anyone, but especially for the murderer, to have committed
the murder, and this is one of the better scenarios. If complex misdirection mysteries appeal to
you, you can hardly do better than JDC.
And this is a very good example of what he can do.
